One Simple Question For All Book Publishers

Given all the twee pathetic whining that Jonathan Galassi, president of print publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux engages in with his New York Times Op Ed: There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen

I have one simple question: When the hell do writers ever get free of you bastards?

It’s already been established that after thirty-five — long long long long ever so long — years, we are by law free from your parasitic enslavement.

Are you going to whine like a crybaby after a business arrangement has been concluded that we owe you — what? — emotional loyalty or some laughably immature shit like that?

If that’s the best card you lot have to play, I’m going to have one happy time dancing on all of your corporate graves!

Additional:

Reclaiming Your Copyright After Thirty-Five Years

Whiny Bookstore-Loving Hypocrites

You are!

Where do you buy your music? Online!

Where do you watch your TV shows and movies? Online!

Where do you watch your porn? Online!

Did you give a damn that record stores became extinct?

Did you give a damn when Suncoast Video went under as a harbinger?

Do you wring your hands at night over the fate of broadcast and cable television?

Did you weep for the X-rated movie theaters?

Just because you have a sick, nostalgic and unnatural fetish for an object called a book doesn’t mean you are anything except sick and retrogressive and, ultimately, ridiculous.

You didn’t cry when everyone else’s ox was being gored.

So STFU now about yours.

Where the hell was your voice over writers being screwed into poverty for decades?

Where the hell were you during the Google Books grand theft?

Where the hell are you today with Random House trying to keep writers locked up as their bitches?

I don’t give a damn for the object called a book.

You can round them all up and burn them for all I care.

What matters — the only thing that matters — are the words locked up in them.

You book fetishists probably don’t even understand that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t about books —

— it was about the words in them. [Update: See Ray Bradbury: Mike Cane Is An Eejit]

The hell with your books.

Give me the words.

Go cry yourself to sleep over your sick attachment to an object and leave the grown ups who understand the words matter alone.

Previously at Mike Cane 2008:

For God’s Sake, Get eBooks Going, Steve Jobs!

Previously here:

Seth Godin: No Power Buyers Equals Death
Two Down, One To Go…
Two Sentences From The Future
The Horror Of Paper Books
The Loudness Of Dust Settling

Five Things Book Publishers Still Need To Learn

Because, really, I need to bang my head against a wall yet again.

1) You are not competing with one another for readers.
Stop thinking of the TV model, where — once upon a time — three national networks actually competed for viewers because there were no VCRs, DVRs, or Internet to time-shift their programs that ran simultaneously. People do not read Simon & Schuster or Doubleday or Random House. They read writers. If I read Ken Bruen right now, it doesn’t mean I can’t read Christopher Fowler later. One book does not cause me to “miss” another book, as watching a program on ABC once made me miss a program on CBS.

2) The only time you compete with one another is for talent.
You let yourselves be suckered into book auctions to prove this. You still prove this by offering best-selling talent ridiculous contract deals that are going to blow up in your face within the next two years. That talent can cut their own deals now with other companies that are hungrier than you.

3) You are competing these days for attention.
Here I am on the Internet, instead of reading a book. Here you are, reading this instead of a book. Gotcha. But it’s not just the Internet, it’s music, movies, what’s left of TV, and it’s especially videogames. Videogames, in fact, are not your competition — they are your enemy. They are stealing away your future customers. How are you going to entice them back?

4) Bookstores and distributors are no longer your customers.
Tower Records, Blockbuster Video — that’s the future of bookstores. You now have to reach readers, the final customer standing, directly. The traditional distance between you and readers is disappearing. Instead of dealing with this new closeness, you’re letting Amazon, Sony, Google and — too soon — Apple step in as new intermediaries. This is suicidal. Even Fox and NBC realized this and created Hulu to battle both Apple and Google (YouTube). What are you doing?

5) Technology companies are out to rob you blind.
Amazon, Sony, Google, Apple are the new four kingdoms. Who knows Simon & Schuster, Random House, Doubleday, et al? No one. Ask anyone, “Who published The DaVinci Code?” and they’ll say, “Dan Brown.” The technology companies are counting on your past — and continued — complacency, lack of technical know-how, lack of focus and vision, and brand invisibility to strip mine you into oblivion. Google is stealing your future: metadata. Fight back.

Is The Amazon Kindle An Outright Fraud?

Amazon Says Kindle and E-Book Sales Set Records

Amazon.com said Monday that its Kindle e-reader has become the most gifted item in the company’s history, but didn’t provide specific sales numbers.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

This is the game Amazon has been playing since the introduction of the Kindle. A “Look over there!” game of misdirection that smells of outright fraud.

It’s well past time for Amazon to put up or shut up.

Honest companies don’t continue to hide something like this.

Honest companies show transparency.

Honest companies understand that real numbers are related to real shareholder value.

What is Amazon’s game here?

Is it the standard Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt ploy? Put fear in the minds of your competitors, put uncertainty in the minds of book publishers, put doubt in the minds of eBook device buyers?

Listen, it’s been claimed that Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Lost Symbol sold 200,000 eBook editions. But that was available in multiple formats. Plus we’re not even certain that number is either truthful or accurate.

Doesn’t anyone realize what an absolutely crappy sales figure that is given the hype the Kindle has gotten since its introduction?

Sony slogged for years and years and years, plastering ads all over the place — and managed to sell “only” 300,000 Readers.

I put “only” in quotes there because compared to the non-existent number of Kindles out there, that’s the impression left in comparison.

FUD.

We have been through a decade of outright fraud as noted in this New York Times column by Frank Rich. The fraudulent invasion of Iraq, the fraudulent hype of Enron, the fraudulent low-interest mortgages.

I’m saying until Amazon releases a true number, it smells as fraudulent as the rest of those, period.

And all of you publishers in New York City? It’s time for you to grow some balls.

I’m giving you a task: The first week in January, all of you issue a joint press release stating what your largest eBook sellers have been on the Kindle.

I have a feeling all of you are going to be shocked at the low cards you’ve been holding, while thinking your “competitor” has been holding a high card, making money hand over fist via Amazon Kindle Store downloads.

Do it!

Let’s end this stench one way or another.

The Authors Guild Leadership: 21st Century Chamberlains

Actual photo of Authors Guild letter being displayed by leadership

The Authors Guild has responded to the resignation letter of noted writer Ursula K. Le Guin.

This fragment of a sentence is emblematic of the absolute cluelessness of the organization’s alleged leadership:

Since creating a search engine is rather simple

What the fuck?

No, really.

Do they think a search engine is no more than the Search function they use in Microsoft Word or Open Office?

What the hell is wrong with the leadership of this Guild?

How is it possible to have leadership this inept, this ignorant, this clueless?

You have given away trillions of dollars of valuable metadata! You have condemned all current and future writers to peonage! You have annihilated the publishing industry completely!

All of you: RESIGN! TODAY!

Previously here:

Writer Ursula K. Le Guin Nails Authors Guild
And You Will Trust Google With All Of Our Books?
This Is Print Publishing’s Final Warning
Mark The Words Of Dave Winer
Sergey Brin: Also Absolutely Inexcusably Clueless
Google Thinks It Owns Our Books!
The First Step Towards A Google Book Search Solution
Google Always Had POD Planned
God Bless Marybeth Peters Of The Copyright Office!
Google Books Settlement Notes #2
Tomorrow: Google Books Settlement Deadline For Writers
Cooler Adds Google’s One Million ePubs Of Crap!
Google Books Settlement Notes #1
Google’s Great Writer Rip-Off
Google’s One Million eBooks Of Crap!
The Capitulation Of Print Publishing
Reject The Google Book Search Settlement!

Writer Ursula K. Le Guin Nails Authors Guild

In her resignation letter, this is the key sentence:

And now you have sold us down the river.

Precisely!

Now where the hell is the rest of the membership to overthrow the sellout bastards?

Previously here:

And You Will Trust Google With All Of Our Books?
This Is Print Publishing’s Final Warning
Mark The Words Of Dave Winer
Sergey Brin: Also Absolutely Inexcusably Clueless
Google Thinks It Owns Our Books!
The First Step Towards A Google Book Search Solution
Google Always Had POD Planned
God Bless Marybeth Peters Of The Copyright Office!
Google Books Settlement Notes #2
Tomorrow: Google Books Settlement Deadline For Writers
Cooler Adds Google’s One Million ePubs Of Crap!
Google Books Settlement Notes #1
Google’s Great Writer Rip-Off
Google’s One Million eBooks Of Crap!
The Capitulation Of Print Publishing
Reject The Google Book Search Settlement!

Apple’s Two-Faced Censorship At Work Again

I’m just stunned this is in the App Store:

Sex Position interacts with you to select new positions, then offers a few pointers. With it you can create the variety that’s the “spice” of a great sex life.

At one point, Apple was blocking eBook apps because they could access the Kama Sutra on public domain eBook websites!

And now Apple is permitting screenshots such as this:

How Book Publishing Will Lose: eBooks Vs. Smart Digital Books

Two Major Publishers To Hold Back E-Books

“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback,” said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. “We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.“

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Carolyn Reidy, is it difficult to be this clueless?

Let’s see … not a single Harry Potter book has been released in electronic format.

Yet is every Harry Potter book available in every electronic format?

Yes.

All you’re doing with this delay is saying: “Hey, kids! Rev up your scanners and bleed our writers to death!”

Harlequin 451

New Title: You Never Know With People Who Have A Different Gender

Previously here:

Future Staffing At Harlequin
Harlequin: Saving Readers From Writers
Writer James Hadley Chase eBooks Coming!

Future Staffing At Harlequin

Blessed are the conservative in Bible translation

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The Gospel of Luke records that, as he was dying on the cross, Jesus showed his boundless mercy by praying for his killers this way: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Not so fast, say contributors to the Conservative Bible Project.

The project, an online effort to create a Bible suitable for contemporary conservative sensibilities, claims Jesus’ quote is a disputed addition abetted by liberal biblical scholars, even if it appears in some form in almost every translation of the Bible.

They’d fit right into Harlequin’s twisted Editorial Department!

And get this:

The best of the public is better than a group of experts.

I hope that’s the kind of health care you wind up with, you imbecile. Your swift death by the hand of likewise incompetency would improve the human race!

Previously here:

Harlequin: Saving Readers From Writers
Writer James Hadley Chase eBooks Coming!